Before I start, I must tell you about Fife light. Or try - because it's impossible to describe, so I hope you get an idea of its changing quality from the different colours in the photographs. The relatively flat terrain and expanse of sea (the Firth of Forth, on the other side of which is Edinburgh and East Lothian) there is an awful lot of sky. And the light is amazing, whatever is going on with the weather. There is a pinky-lilac-grey quality to the light a lot of the time, and at other times, particularly sunset, it's golden. The sea during the day shines like mercury. It is not surprising that Fife is home to a lot of artists. It's not an exciting place - the coastline doesn't have the drama of the islands - but there's a kind of peaceful translucence that settles over the land that is quietly captivating in the way it changes all the time. I have only been here a few days, but have over a hundred photographs of not much except sky.
Well, everything comes to she who waits - and today there was no wind, and enough sun to strip off a few layers, which hasn't been the case for quite a while. I celebrated by getting up early and embarking on a proper day out.
We started at Kellie Castle, which I didn't know much about but which turns out to have been the home for many years of Hew Lorimer the sculptor, son of Robert Lorimer the architect. Hew Lorimer was influenced by Eric Gill, particularly his sculptures, and was a follower of the Arts and Crafts style - simple, hand-crafted, beautiful artefacts for a social purpose. He did many sculptures for the church, and was also an accomplished letter-cutter. One of the most well-known of his works was Our Lady of the Isles, which I saw in the Hebrides. A smaller version of the sculpture is in his workshop, which has been preserved at Kellie (you can see her head here, with the light behind her, as well as another statue and some of his lettering).
Bon and I did a nice woodland walk and then I tied her up and visited the Walled Garden. Beautiful - happy people working there, clipping and digging away, and a lovely mixture of fruit trees (in fruit!), vegetables, and flowers. A useful garden in a lovely spot, and even the laden apple-trees looked as if they were designed by William Morris.
The villages in the East Neuk of Fife are famously pictureseque, full of little fishermen's cottages tottering down to a series of harbours. We started with Pittenweem. I parked by the harbour, and went to find a cup of coffee and a sandwich. I found a cafe and tied Bonnie to my backpack while I went in for the coffee, and when I got back out I found she'd pulled the bag across the pavement to talk to a lady who was sitting at one of the tables outside. I observed out loud that Bonnie had dragged her anchor, and the lady said, well we all do from time to time, don't we, otherwise, what's life for?
I then went along part of the Fife Coastal Path - via a long conversation with two dog-loving ladies sitting sunning themselves in front of one of the houses - and had a little picnic. The views back to the village were lovely. The houses are pretty and higgledy-piggledy with tiny walled gardens tucked away. They all have the characteristic crow-stepped gables and many houses have rooftiles that would be more at home in Portugal or Spain - that's because the tiles came as ballast in otherwise empty ships from just those places, and were dumped when the ships took on cargo in Scotland. Free rooftiles for Fife cottages! There are many galleries in Pittenweem, and it is a haunt of artists - I had a browse through a lovely shop called 'Funky Scotland', which is full of interesting indigenous ceramics, jewellery and textiles, but didn't succumb to anything.
I went through Anstruther, which lies between Pittenweem and Crail, without stopping. It's one of the most crowded and popular of the East Neuk villages and has two famous chip shops that both claim to be the best in Scotland (although most reports say that's a place in Tyndrum, but perhaps not wise to argue the point in Anstruther). It has the nearest to a commercial seafront, and is pretty, but not the place to be trying to park a camper van. So I went straight through to Crail, which has red sandstone buildings where Pittenweem's are painted white. Crail has a famous pottery, which we visited, and the Crail Gallery is home to a family of lino-cutters who make lovely pictures of Fife and the area. I was spoilt for choice here, and spent a long time in the shop talking to Susie Lacome, who makes detailed, naive pictures of Fife coastal scenes, featuring boats, cats, Fife cottages, gardens, and people chatting on the seafront. They are the kind of pictures that children love, because the more you look, the more little details you see. Her husband, David Sim, has a darker, more schematic style, perhaps more humourous and less literal, and her daughter Rachel Sim has a lovely eye for colour and composition - some of the same scenes, but less detailed and more 'stand back' pictures, again of boats and the villages. They are connected with Dundee School of Art where they make the bigger pictures, but Susie makes the smaller ones in the back of the shop. She's now doing collage work with lino-cut printed paper, some of which is old musical scores, so there is faint music on the cut-out houses and birds and pebbles. The lino she prints from is itself very pretty (although, of course, backwards) and she uses real lino from Kirkcaldy (which used to be, and perhaps is still, famous for it. Remember Nairn flooring?)
After spending an age in the shop (which you can probably tell from Bonnie's posture), I got the credit card out again. I would have liked something from each of them, but settled on a print of 'Eleven Dugs', which I'm attempting to show here. There's something feisty and cheerful about the dogs, I think, but they are also quite poignant. And it more than serves to address the dog/cat balance brought about by the Wemyss cat purchase.
All this is what I came to Fife hoping to experience again. I love the fact that people are working away in the cottages making wonderful things, and then can come out and sit among their flowers or pick vegetables from their gardens, watch the light change over the sea, and even create small pieces of philosophy on the spur of the moment to share with passers by!
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